


a smell of stale fear that's reeking from our skins

by celeste9



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Comfort Sex, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Extra Treat, F/F, F/M, First Time, Stranded
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-08-28 11:20:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16722375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celeste9/pseuds/celeste9
Summary: When Poe and Jess are stranded far from the Resistance with no real hope of getting back, they find themselves relying on each other in unexpected ways.





	a smell of stale fear that's reeking from our skins

**Author's Note:**

  * For [outruntheavalanche](https://archiveofourown.org/users/outruntheavalanche/gifts).



> The timeline is completely fudged but picture this happening before TFA, contains established Jess/Karé. Title from The Bravery.

Poe still hadn’t stopped believing that they could find their way through this.

Jess wished she were that optimistic.

-

“Jess! Jess! For fuck’s sake, don’t leave me on my own, wake up!”

It hurt to open her eyes. Everything hurt.

There was a warm hand on her cheek and when she cracked her eyes open she was met with the sight of Poe’s dirty face.

He exhaled. “Oh, thank kriff. Now, don’t panic, okay, but this might… look kinda bad.”

“There’s…” Jess spread her fingers across her middle and felt something that definitely didn’t belong. She looked down and wished she hadn’t; apparently she had been impaled by a piece of their freighter. “Stars. Kriffing hell. Fuck!”

Poe gnawed at his lip. “I’m not a doctor, uh, obviously, but it went clean through and I don’t think it hit anything important. I’ve got the medkit and I… just need to pull it out. Should I have done it while you were out? I was afraid to, I was afraid you wouldn’t wake up, and--”

“Just fucking get it out of me, Dameron,” Jess said, gritting her teeth.

“Yeah. Okay.” He went quiet, and then said, “One, two,” and yanked before he got to three.

Jess yelled. She heard a clatter as presumably Poe tossed the offending article away. There was a sting of disinfectant and then the cool press of bacta; Jess’ consciousness swam, then went black.

-

When she woke again everything still hurt, but not quite as urgently. Poe was sitting beside her, the look of worry on his face uncomfortably foreign and unfamiliar. Poe never worried.

“Situation?” she asked, her voice a strange croak.

Poe tilted a bottle of water to her lips, gently holding her head to help her swallow. “You’re alive, so I’m considering that a victory.”

“I’m pretty happy about that myself, honestly.”

“Could’ve gone either way. Like I said, I’m not a doctor.”

“Thanks for not killing me.”

“Anytime.” That worried expression came back. “I have no idea where we are, the ship’s in pieces, and I haven’t been able to fix the comms.”

“Business as usual?”

Poe finally smiled faintly. “Yeah. We’re Black Squadron. We’ll figure it out.”

-

They didn’t figure it out.

-

“Nothing?” Jess asked, when Poe came stumbling wearily back to their camp, returning from his longest excursion yet. Her middle still ached too much for Jess to risk long forays herself; by virtue of wanting to survive they had agreed that she could be useful here while Poe looked for signs of life.

She supposed she could have been more hopeful, could have asked, ‘anything?’ instead, but optimism wasn’t so much her thing and it was getting harder to remain hopeful.

“Nothing,” Poe sighed, and plopped down beside her on the log by the fire.

They had lost count of the days; neither of them had expected to remain here as long as they had so they hadn’t put effort into keeping track. Jess supposed they had to be on months rather than weeks now. She offered him the rodent on a stick she had been turning over the fire.

The rations were used up weeks ago. They had learned not to be picky.

-

It rained a lot, the ground a near constant swell of mud. They had found a cave their first week on the planet, which helped keep them dry. Jess’ wound had healed, but it was scarring and the rain always made it ache.

The freighter was… well, it wasn’t really a freighter anymore, but that didn’t stop Poe and Jess from tinkering with it. Less now than they had, because Jess thought even Poe had given up on salvaging any part of it, but she would find him there in the evenings sometimes, messing with the radio again, trying to fit parts from elsewhere in an effort to repair it. Sometimes she woke early and spent four hours fiddling around with it, to feel like she was trying, like she was doing something, and just to… All this nothingness wore on her. She felt better working on a ship, even if the ship was complete garbage.

“Maybe if Beebee-Ate were here,” Poe said, over and over, and Jess didn’t think BB-8 could have made a difference but she never said so.

Poe only missed him.

-

The cave was small, but there was room enough for them to keep their sleeping areas separate. They had pulled what they could out of the crew cabin in the freighter and split it between them, so they wouldn’t need to lie directly on the hard ground.

After a week, they pushed it all together and slept curled around each other. They never spoke about it, but Jess knew Poe had to feel the same as she did.

They didn’t want to feel alone.

-

Poe told Jess about his father, about how he had felt the war coming, about how he had understood the decisions Poe made. He told her that his dad was alone now, his mother gone for decades, and now Poe…

She thought that was what hurt him the most, the knowledge that his father didn’t know he was alive, the idea that he might never see him again. She didn’t know what to say, because she couldn’t give him hope she didn’t feel herself, and his worry only made her feel sad.

“I miss Karé,” Jess whispered, leaning against Poe.

“I know,” he said, and held her.

-

It rained for four days straight and the cave started leaking. They huddled together wet and miserable and yet unable to leave.

When it finally stopped, they discovered half of what was left of the freighter had washed away. Jess shouted and raged and threw things until finally she broke down; she was so embarrassed and ashamed that she pushed Poe away when he tried to help.

He left her alone. When it was dark, she found him in the damp cave and lay next to him. He said nothing, but he wrapped his arm around her and drew her close.

-

Jess told Poe about the pirates that had imprisoned her family when she was young. She had never told anyone but Karé.

“I _hate_ this,” she said. “I hate not being able to do anything. I hate waiting. I hate knowing it’s all useless. I hate… We’re going to die here, you know? It might be years from now, but we’re going to die here.”

“I don’t believe that,” Poe said, his eyes on the stars. “I’m going to see my dad, and you’re going to see Karé. We’re going to get off this planet.”

The problem was that Jess didn’t believe him.

-

Maybe it was inevitable, what happened. Jess was tired, and lonely, and she missed Karé. She was… she was afraid. Afraid of never getting off this planet, afraid of what was happening to her friends so far away, afraid of never seeing her girlfriend again.

All she had was Poe. Stupid, warm-hearted Poe, whom she loved even when she wanted to knock his head in. He brought tiny flowers he’d found growing in a tree stump and stuck them behind her ear, smiling. He didn’t complain (okay, too much, at least) when Jess burned the only food they had and he hadn’t laughed when she broke down in tears over their broken ship. He still hoped, and he was so stupid, but he was all she had.

He almost felt like enough.

His hair was too long and he hadn’t shaved; his beard scratched her face when they kissed. He was heavy and he didn’t feel at all like Karé but he was warm and made her forget for just a moment how afraid she was, how much she hated this, how they might never, ever leave. Tears leaked from her eyes and he kissed them away; she held him long after they were finished.

-

“I couldn’t do this without you,” Poe whispered into her hair; he must have thought she was asleep.

Jess let him continue thinking that.

-

She thought she was dreaming when the Resistance came. How could Karé be here, on this hellhole of a planet? She had imagined it so many times, that Karé would come, Karé would find her, so it had to be a dream.

Only Karé never felt this real in her dreams, and she never cried.

“Karé,” Jess said, and couldn’t believe it was real.

-

Jess held Poe’s hand for the entire flight to the Resistance base.

-

After, there was a lot of talk of ‘what happened’ and ‘how did you survive’ and ‘this is how we found you’ and Jess discovered that the only way to get through it was to remove herself from the situation, like it had happened to someone else. How could she genuinely describe what she had been through to these… her friends, well-meaning, but who could never really understand? They couldn’t know how it had felt.

She sat very close to Poe and felt better when she looked at his face.

-

Karé smelled so, so good. It was probably silly that that was all Jess could think, but she couldn’t stop.

Karé kissed her belly, where her scar was, and Jess shivered and tangled her fingers into Karé’s hair. This was everything she had wanted and thought she would never have again, and Jess…

She shuddered, overwhelmed, and made Karé stop. “Sorry, kriff, I’m sorry,” she said, and Karé shushed her.

“It’s okay, babe,” she said, and just held her, stroking her hair. “You’re okay.”

But Jess didn’t know how to be okay.

-

“I can’t sleep,” she told Poe.

“Me, neither,” he admitted. It still seemed strange to see him with his face shaved, the day’s stubble rather than his curly black beard.

They fell asleep in the ready room, Jess’ head on Poe’s shoulder and his arm around her waist.

-

“I love Karé,” Jess said.

“Yeah, I know.” Poe hesitated. “Do you think… we can just… You’re basically my best friends, both of you. But I don’t know how to pretend what happened on that planet didn’t happen.”

“I didn’t love you,” Jess said, and bit her lip until it stung. “Not like that.”

“I didn’t love you, either.”

“Right.” Jess sighed, and wondered how they could ever go back.

-

General Organa kept them off flight duty for weeks, citing their psychological health, and then could no longer justify grounding them.

Jess felt better in her cockpit than she had since she came back.

-

“I slept with Poe,” Jess told Karé in the darkness of their quarters. “When we were lost.”

Karé was quiet for a while. “That makes sense.”

“Are you upset?”

“No, of course not. I… I get why you keep things from me, and I know I can’t really understand. But if you want to talk to me, you know you can. Always.”

“I know,” Jess said, and kissed her.

-

The stars were clearer on D’Qar than on that miserable, wet, mud pit. Jess liked to stay out into the night, just gazing up. Sometimes she was alone, sometimes with Poe, sometimes with Karé.

On a night that was chillier than D’Qar typically was, pressed up against Karé, Jess said, “I gave up. Poe never did, not completely, but I did.”

Karé only kissed her temple, and Jess was glad she didn’t say anything.

-

Poe picked flowers in the jungle beyond the base and brought them into the hangar. He tucked them behind Jess’ ear, her face smeared with grease, and offered her the same goofy, shy smile he had back on that planet.

Jess hugged him, tucking her face against his neck. “Thank you,” she mumbled, and hoped he knew what she meant.

He hugged her back and Jess thought that maybe, somehow, they would figure out how to be okay.


End file.
